Gordie by Roy MacSkimming

Author:Roy MacSkimming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO020000
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2012-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Ten | The Wings’ Unravelling

“There’s always some reason to trade a player—maybe he’s a clubhouse lawyer.”

—Jack Adams, 1962

The 1954 Stanley Cup winners were Tommy Ivan’s last Red Wing team. Before the next season began, Jack Adams despatched Ivan to the sinking Chicago Black Hawks—who had regained their losing ways—as part of a concerted league attempt to rebuild the Norris family’s other NHL franchise. The three strongest teams, Detroit, Montreal and Toronto, all contributed quality players to the effort. In the Red Wings’ case, Metro Prystai reluctandy accompanied his coach back to his former team (although he’d return to Detroit the next season).

Adams was now in an interesting position: with Ivan and James Norris Sr. both gone, he had an increasingly freer hand in running the Red Wings—a situation that, before long, would have ruinous consequences for the club.

Norris, the crusty old owner who had wielded a restraining authority and held the purse strings for twenty years, had been replaced after his death by his quarrelling daughter and son, Marguerite and Bruce. Although Marguerite Norris had learned from her father how to handle Adams and his excesses, Bruce Norris had not; after Bruce assumed the presidency from his sister in 1955, Adams’s leash unfortunately grew longer. And almost simultaneously, the buffer between Adams and the Detroit players had also been removed. Adams’s compulsion to meddle with the inner workings of the team, and his deep and irrational suspicions of certain players, which grew deeper and more irrational as he got older, would devastate the Red Wings’ dynasty.

All the men who played under Adams have their stories about his erratic, capricious, domineering, sometimes incomprehensible behaviour. Individually, those incidents might have seemed minor at the time; together, they added up to a pattern that kept his players perpetually off balance and irredeemably damaged their morale. Part of Adams’s troubling inconsistency was that, on occasion, he could also be appreciative of and even affectionate towards his men. But one thing they could count on: the moment never lasted long.

Marty Pavelich recalls a night in Montreal when the Red Wings had defeated the Canadiens. Adams had seemed exceptionally pleased. While Pavelich was standing on the platform at Westmount Station, waiting to board the train back to Detroit, Adams came up and put his arm around him. “Geez, Blackie,” Adams told him, “you played great tonight. Your line was really flying out there!” Figuring he was in the Old Man’s good books, Pavelich was completely baffled when Adams scarcely played him the next night in Detroit. Had Adams changed his mind about him? Had he wanted to bring Pavelich down a peg or two, so the praise wouldn’t go to his head? “Why?” Pavelich still asks himself today. “Who knows?”

Adams’s compulsion to put his players in their place had a damaging effect on a rising young Red Wing who joined the team in 1953. Bill Dineen, who later became a respected coach (twenty years later he’d be Howe’s first WHA coach in Houston), was having an

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